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Top Social Media Marketing Tips For Small Businesses

Dotcom Note — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 17:08:53 +0000

If you’re running a small business, marketing your business using the latest trend social media is the the last thing in your mind. You have lots of daily chores to take care on top of maintaining your web site that you, at last, launched after years of putting it off. Now you hear this latest trend where you can acquire prospects and develop customer relationships. People tell you that this social media marketing is the future of all marketing and unless you start using it, you will be left behind and crushed by your competitors.

But you don’t know where to start and what to do. You have heard about Facebook from your teenage son but you’re not sure how to use it for promoting your business. Everybody is talking about Twitter, a service where you can send your messages using only 140 characters. You wonder what can you say in 140 characters? And how is it going to help you find new prospects and convert them into paying customers.

You’re wondering why people are not visiting your website and you’re not receiving inquires from prospective customers. If all these sound very hard and really daunting, you’re not alone. Millions of small business wish to get more traffic to their websites, more customer inquires, and more prospects. But they don’t know how to develop a social media marketing plan and execute it to get results.

There is no dearth of information on social media marketing but the learning curve is very stiff unless if get some solid, actionable, and easy tips to start your social media marketing journey. The article I publish below is from TopRankBlog. It is an online marketing blog that you should visit whenever you have time because it provides easy and actionable tips that you can use to get more traffic to your websites and, possibly, more prospects and paying customers.

1. Start small

You’ll want to start small and try a couple services out at a time. Oftentimes newbies sign up for every social network under the sun and try to grow each of them. Guess how long they last? Building profiles for multiple social sites is hard work, so it’s best to start by only tackling a couple at first.

Once you find the right ones for you or your brand, then start to narrow your focus on those. Eventually you may want to scale your social media strategy to include more services, but you have to crawl before you can walk.

Start small, and then grow to other social networks as your confidence grows. Success breeds success.

2. Get a widget

Put a widget up on your site for your social networks. The best place to find followers is your own blog or site. Also, it’s much easier to get your readers and friends to vote or retweet your content than strangers. Adding a widget next to your content can help.

Facebook has a widget generator you can use, and the Tweetmeme badge is easy to add to your site as well.

3. Frequently test your buttons and widgets

Start testing which social media profiles have the most impact, then drop the rest. For example, if your site does really well with Facebook shares but hardly ever gets voted on Digg, then drop the Digg vote button.

Oftentimes you’ll see sites littered with tons of widgets and buttons. Having a gazillion widgets at the end of each article only creates noise and annoys the reader. Figure out which buttons are getting clicked, and drop the buttons that don’t convert. Ideally you’ll only have two or three widgets on each page.

You can tell which buttons are effective by using Google Analytics and goals to see who’s clicking what. You can also use A/B to see which types of buttons are getting more clicks.

4. Don’t annoy your followers

Sounds like common sense, right? Unfortunately, lots of companies that are just starting out with social media think the best way to “promote” their brand is to publish coupons, offers, news, and anything else related to their business.

Rule of thumb: if it’s something you personally wouldn’t like to receive, avoid it.

Your social media goal is to be helpful first. People follow and respect brands that are helpful, not self-promoting shills. Give first, then ask.

Try posting useful links to industry articles, answer questions, and engage. The followers, engagement, and ultimately sales will come if you’re helpful first.

5. Don’t fret about follower counts

Don’t believe all the spammy ebooks out there that sell you the notion that you can attract thousands of followers in a matter of days. Sure, you could do that and it’s not hard. But the types of followers who are going to be following you are mostly bots. Or they’re just following you in hopes that you’ll follow them back. Ultimately, they aren’t followers who would engage with you.

You want social media followers that are going to listen and interact with you, and 10 of those followers is worth more than a thousand bots.

It takes a while to organically build up a great social profile. Focus on building great content and being helpful, and the followers will come.

6. See what the pros are doing

Everyone has a different strategy when it comes to social media, and sometimes it’s best to take a look at people who are real social media experts. Lee Odden is a good example of someone using Twitter and Facebook to help people, which in turn grows his social media influence.

There are plenty of fantastic examples of people who truly understand how to interact and build powerful social media profiles the right way. Check out sites like WeFollow to find influential Twitter users within your niche.

7. Don’t overlook niche social media sites

When people think of social media, they typically think of Twitter or Facebook. But there are literally hundreds (maybe thousands?) of social media networks and sites that you can use to help promote your brand. Jut because a network isn’t huge doesn’t mean it’s not going to impact your social media strategy. Oftentimes targeted niche social sites can bring more targeted traffic to your site than larger sites.

If you’re smart, you can use smaller social networks to help promote your site on other bigger social networks. For example, I’ve written posts on web development that have made it to the front page of Dzone, a social media site for web development. Once the article made it to the front page of Dzone, the attention brought a lot of saves on Delicious, and subsequently made it to the Delicious front page. The delicious front page brought even more traffic, and those Delicious users voted the story up to the Digg front page. So, by simply submitting my site on a smaller niche news site with a great headline, I managed to make it to the coveted homepages of both Digg and Delicious.

Niche social news sites can be very powerful, and oftentimes much easier to become influential in than the larger sites. Here’s a list of social news sites organized by category.

8. Find people within your niche to follow on Twitter

The ideal follower on Twitter is one that has similar interests within your niche. You can find like-minded people to follow on Twitter through these directories and odds are many will follow you back.

Once you’ve started following these people, start interacting with them. Participate in discussions, and retweet things they say that would be helpful to your community.

Not only will this method help build your follower counts, it also gives you more influence within your niche. You’ll find great friends that will help you promote your content and site too. Always remember to give first and ask later.

9. Stay Humble

Social media beginners often try to quickly establish themselves as “experts” within their field, but they have nothing to back it up. (For example, search for “social media experts” on Twitter. You’ll find many with only a handful of followers. Shouldn’t an “expert” have more?)

Original Source: 9 Essential Social Media Tips For Beginners

The post above has lots of resource link that you can check out at your leisure to speed up your learning curve. The best way to use social media marketing is to plunge into it and do something as discussed in the above post. Social media marketing takes time but the reward lasts long. Follow the steps discussed in the post and it will work wonder.

Image Credit: tibchris

Top Facebook Advertising Tips Every Internet Marketers Must Know

Dotcom Note — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 04:55:53 +0000

Facebook is rapidly becoming a favorite advertising source for online marketers. It has more than 500 billion page views and 540 million unique users. Almost all the demographics from more than 100 countries are well represented in Facebook network. As an online marketer, you can target ads based on gender, age-group, interests, likes, dislikes, and a host of other factors. It is online marketers dream. If you want to find a specific group of people who will be highly interested in your offerings, Facebook advertising network is able to deliver what you are searching for. Armed with Facebook advertising tips, you will be able to sell more products and services using their advertising network.

However, most online marketers have no clues how to get started. Many marketers try Facebook advertising for a few weeks and lose a lot of money because of low conversions. They wondered what went wrong. Facebook advertising is different than traditional online advertising like pay per click or banner advertising that most marketers are used to. If you apply the tips and tricks you have learned in tradional online marketing to Facebook marketing, you may not see very good results. So, I started searching for a good blog post about Facebook marketing tips and I can tell you that there are lots of good information out there for free.

The basic strategies that you should be aware of before you plan your Facebook advertising campaign is listed in this blog post at AllFacebook. Some of the strategies you can use immediately and others are broad knowledge-based tips that will help improve your conversion rates. Learn these strategies before you take any action.

1. Facebook Is Least Effective At Direct Sales

If you’ve come to Facebook looking for instantaneous sales than you’ve come to the wrong place. Facebook presents businesses with the opportunity to reach their target market throughout the entire marketing cycle. While a small percentage of users are ready to purchase while they’re browsing Facebook, a much larger percentage of users are going to make a purchase in the future if not now.

Fortunately you have the opportunity to build an ongoing relationship with your customer and that’s what Facebook is most useful for: building relationships. It’s a platform to build ongoing relationships and “remarket” to your customers, as Facebook says in some of their own marketing copy. Understanding that these users are not ready to purchase is key to success on Facebook.

As I outlined in the 5 phases of the Facebook sales funnel, Facebook is about relationship marketing. As Wikipedia describes, “Relationship marketing differs from other forms of marketing in that it recognizes the long term value to the firm of keeping customers, as opposed to direct or ‘Intrusion’ marketing, which focuses upon acquisition of new clients by targeting majority demographics based upon prospective client lists.”

2. Create A Greater Volume Of Ads That Target Less People

Often times on Google, advertisers will create an ad which targets every person in a single country and then split test two ad versions against each other. On Facebook this model will do nothing but cost you money. Placing a generic ad that’s targeted at an entire country, without any additional targeting, will do nothing but get you a lot of clicks and waste a lot of money for the most part.

Facebook provides 11 targeting factors for advertisers (with three new factors announced yesterday). Below is an outline of each of those factors:

Location - Facebook enables advertisers to target by country, state/provice, city, and metropolitan areas. All advertisements are required to have a location selected. This should be pretty straight-forward as to which location you’d like to select.
Age - Age is a standard demographic factor. Most marketers that have a well defined target-market will be able to select their age.
Birthday - This is one of Facebook’s latest advertising targeting filters. It should be pretty obvious what types of ads should be presented to people who’s birthday it is. Try wishin the user a happy birthday and offer them a gift for higher conversion rates.
Sex - Gender is another typical targeting filter for Facebook.
Keywords - Keywords will are based on a user’s profile information including Activities, Favorite Books, TV Shows, Movies, and more. I believe job titles are included in this field and I typically spend the most time trying to brainstorm effective keywords. What types of products do your customers like? What’s their job position within an organization? Spend time on this field and you’ll be rewarded.
Education - While you can target based on their level of education, this is most effective for targeting ads based on the schools that people went to. Want to announce a reunion for the University of Illinois class of 1996? This is a great way to promote it.
Workplaces - This is another great targeting filter. Often times you will know the companies that your target market works at. If you are looking to get new clients or looking to spread awareness within specific organizations, this filter can be priceless.
Relationship - Want to target people that are about to get married? This is a great tool for that. If you are a bar or club, you most likely want to go after those people that are single. While this filter can be useful, you also need to keep in mind that selecting any of these settings will remove all users that haven’t selected a relationship status in their profile.
Interested In – This factor is useful if a user’s sexual preferences are relevant to whatever you are advertising. I tend to skip this field for most of my ads.
Languages - If your ad is in English but the user speaks Chinese, it’s probably not a good idea to be displaying ads to them.
Connections - The connections fields were launched yesterday by Facebook and they enable you to include and exclude users based on pages, events, and applications that the users have joined and you happen to be the administrator of. If you’ve created a Page and don’t want the ads to display to people who have already joined, this is a great way to avoid duplicate clicks.

If you aren’t taking advantage of the numerous targeting factors then you aren’t using Facebook advertising effectively. In order to have an increased conversion rate on your advertisements, increase the targeting in order to make the advertisement more relevant for the users. Relevance will get people to respond to your ad.

3. Friend Users Before You Sell To Them

Facebook is about relationship marketing, not direct sales (as I described in the first law). That means it’s more important to build a relationship with a potential client or an existing customer rather than closing a sale right away. So how does this law show up in practice? The most obvious form is through the Facebook Ads for pages and events.

Through these advertisements, users can become a fan or RSVP to an event directly from an ad. At that point, you have the opportunity to interact directly with that individual and build a relationship. If you had directed a user to your website, you would have been forced to have them enter a form or make a purchase right away. The odds of getting a user to fill out a form or make a purchase immediately is far less than getting them to become a fan of a Page or RSVPing to an event.

In addition to having an increased conversion, you are also now able to reach out to individuals directly if you wish. For example if someone RSVPs to an event, but you don’t know who they are, you can send them a message welcoming them to the event and inquiring about more information. This form of relationship building is used to build lasting customers, not one time purchases, and it is core to Facebook marketing.

4. Understand Your Market

On Google, a shoe retailer will develop an advertisement that targets people who are “looking to purchase shoes”. These advertisers will look for people who are carelessly misspelling a word while searching for something in order to convert them into a customer. It’s a great model for generating one-time sales but unfortunately these advertisers don’t always understand their market.

In order to become an effective Facebook advertiser, you need to have effectively defined your market. This will help you to take advantage of the 11 targeting factors that Facebook currently provides. To help define your market, you can go through the market segmentation process. This involves defining the need your company satisfies and then more thoroughly defining who your customer is.

After exhaustively defining who your customer is, you’ll be more effective at defining the targeting factors to be used in Facebook advertisements.

5. Set Advertising Budgets With A Goal In Mind

It’s extremely easy to spend a lot of money on Facebook advertisements by “experimenting”. I can’t tell you how many people I know that have aimlessly spent thousands of dollars on Facebook advertisements but couldn’t point to tangible goals that they had accomplished. If you set a budget on a campaign for $20 a day you should know what you would like to receive for that money.

Yes, we all want customers, but as I’ve continuously emphasized: Facebook marketing is not about instant sales. With that in mind, below are two practices that are good to keep in mind when setting your goals.

Think Long-Term: In terms of sales, the payoff will be further down the line so be prepared to spend over weeks and months, don’t blow your budget in a day. Unless you are an affiliate marketer (who has distinctly different goals), you should be invested in the advertising for the long haul. A one-week campaign is not going to bring you riches, but a long-term investment in advertising can produce measurable results.

This means don’t spend beyond your means for one week and have no money left at the end. Instead, set reasonable budgets that you’ll be able to handle for longer periods of time.

Measure Initial Conversions As Fans, Comments, and Likes: Since most users will not make a purchase right away, you need to make sure that you are at least engaging them. Would you go out on a first date with someone and then wait two weeks to call them back? If you want to see them again I hope you don’t wait two weeks to follow-up. The same goes for your fans. Follow-up with your fans often and consistently.

6. Monitor Your Ad Performance And Adjust Accordingly

Now that you’ve defined your goals, it’s time to track whether or not you’ve achieved them. Throughout each Facebook advertising campaign, you should be tracking how well the advertisements perform. Are you on track to reach the goals that you’ve set? Are your advertisements achieving a reasonable click-through level?

Facebook provides advertisers with a number of monitoring tools including their basic ad manager area as well as downloadable data about each campaign you are running. If you visit the ad reports area you can download three types of reports to determine how your campaigns and ads are performing: advertising performance, responder demographics, responder profiles.

The primary things to monitor are clicks, click through rates (CTR), actions, action rates, and CPC. Each of these variables will differ depending on what type of campaign that you’re running but in theory, the more targeted your ad, the higher click through rate you should have. Additionally, your click through rate will tend to go down over time as your entire target population views your ad and decides whether or not they want to respond.

7. Test Landing Pages Versus Facebook Pages

In traditional online advertising, users are directed to a landing page from which they are prompted to fill in information in a form. This information is then typically used to send marketing literature. On Facebook, you want to build relationships but if the relationships you are building aren’t generating any revenue, you may want to diversify your advertising strategy by including some landing pages.

Yes, building relationships are extremely valuable and despite those users never making a purchase, they can become effective brand advocates that ultimately drive new customers to your business. For smaller businesses, investing in brand advocates is often considered to be a costly proposition which is why investing in some direct sales is always useful.

The point of this law is that Facebook advertising combined with relationship marketing cannot be your only strategy. You need to generate sales and sometimes that means being direct and converting a customer. If you want another phrase to summarize this law: “diversify, diversify, diversify”.

8. Split Test Ads By Demographic

An advertiser once told me that women tend to react more often to advertisements that have the color pink in them. While I doubt this is consistent across all women, this could be true for a large portion of them. The only way to find out if it is true is to split test different ads within that specific demographic. I’ll use an example to illustrate this rule.

Let’s say that you’ve created an advertisement that’s targeted at CEOs of companies in the Northeast region of the United States. You can create two advertisements and compare which version of the ad results in a larger response. An example lesson learned would be that “CEOs in the Northeast region tend to respond better to ads with the word ‘influence’ over the word ‘power’”.

As you narrow your targeting, you can begin to adjust your advertisements even further. For example, as a second step you can now create separate ads for CEOs in the Boston area and CEOs in the New York metropolitan area. Each step along the way you should be refining your advertising copy while incorporating some of the lessons learned from the previous steps.

As you increase your targeting, you can incorporate some of the lessons learned from previous steps.

9. Develop Creative Ad Copy

This honestly has to be one of the most important laws. Conversion is primarily about two things: your ad copy and the landing page. If your advertisement doesn’t provide a call to action, there is a good chance that the user won’t respond. Facebook ads for pages and events already provide a call to action but generic advertisements don’t. If you offer the user something for clicking, there’s an increased chance they will click.

The best way to determine effective ad copy is to take a look at the existing sites around the web. Which are the ones that you see most often? Even if the ads appear to be annoying, if you continuously see them, there’s a good chance that they are doing something right. Click on ads and see what types of products are being offered and what the pitch is.

The best way to improve your advertising is through research and other advertisers provide you with plenty of free information. While copywriting books can assist with writing effective headlines as well as how to structure landing pages, your best information will come from other ads. Also check out magazine racks at book stores and see what headlines are being used. Often times you will find great headline ideas there.

10. Don’t Over Target

In the eighth law I outlined how the more that you target, the more you can begin to hone your ad copy. While increased targeting can increase click through rates, determining how to most effectively target sub-segments of your customer population can be costly both in time and in money. While you should most definitely take advantage of Facebook’s targeting features, it’s more important that you get your company’s name out there and then build the relationships.

Everything in marketing is a balance and the last thing you want to do is spend all of your time increasing ad relevance while not interacting with the users who are clicking through on the ads. Spend time tracking your ads’ performance but also make sure that you spend time connecting with all the people that respond to your ad.

If you aren’t following through with the marketing process then you aren’t going to generate new customers

Click here for original source

Facebook advertising can produce great results if you know the basics discussed in the All Facebook blog post, reproduced above. All Facebook blog is also a great source for Facebook related information. I would suggest you subscribe to their blog feed to gain more knowledge about all things Facebook. Though there lots of Facebook advertising tips, the 10 tips discussed above will get you started in Facebook advertising with a strong footings.

Image credit: Lyka

How To Drive Traffic Using Social Bookmarketing

Dotcom Note — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 13:34:38 +0000

More and more internet marketers are using social bookmarking sites to drive traffic to their web sites. Of course some, mostly newbie, marketers are also spamming these book marking sites by submitting every blog post and article available in their web sites. That is a wrong approach to drive traffic using social bookmarking sites. Your goal in any social media marketing is to connect with your target audience. Your target audience has needs and you’re trying to full fill that need by sharing valuable information or data.

Before you start using social bookmarking sites to promote your web sites, you need to develop a plan and execute the plan using social media marketing best practices. While the best practices differ from site to site, there is a common thread in all these sites. Social media marketers have already figured out that common thread and they have already developed strategies to conquer social media markets.

You have to find a strategy and use it as a template in your social book-marketing campaign. Of course, you need to change it according to your web site’s content and your goal is to maximize your social media campaign efforts. I found an excellent blog post in MindSprout blog that gives you a set of suggestions that you can use as your blueprint for social media bookmarketing. I’m reproducing the five main points here with proper credit to the author.

1. Pick Your Poison

There are quite a few social bookmarking sites to choose from. Some of the more recognizable names include, Delicious, Stumble Upon, Clipmarks and Digg. Keep in mind that most social bookmarking users are typically loyal to one site, but that doesn’t mean that you need to be. Opening accounts on multiple sites will increase your audience reach and depth.

2. Sir Links-a-Lot

This may seem like a no brainer, but many people often overlook it – don’t forget to bookmark your own website. Creating social bookmarks help to generate backlinks for your site and everyone knows that the more backlinks you have, the higher your page will rank in search engine results. This is why it’s a good idea to establish accounts with several social bookmarking sites.

3. What to Share

With social bookmarking you can save just about anything that’s on the web. Create links to photos and video and, drumroll please, your website’s blog posts. Each time you upload a blog post you should make a new social bookmark link to it. Each day, social bookmarking sites receive millions of visits and spotlighting your blog posts is how you’ll bring them back to your website.

4. Keywords to Success

Marketing with social bookmarking uses a bit of search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. In other words, incorporate keywords into your social bookmarks that you’re building. When you save a blog post or video to a social bookmarking site, you’ll need to tag it with relevant keywords to help others find the bookmark. You’ll also to give your bookmarks come catchy titles that have few keywords added for good measure.

5. Badges! We Got Your Stinkin’ Badges!

After you’ve built your social bookmarking profile, added and tagged your links and inserted appropriate keywords, you’re ready to shamelessly promote the fruits of your labor. Create social bookmarking badges for the sites that you belong to and display them on your website and other social media profiles.

Click here for the original article.

Driving traffic using social bookmarketing is neither new nor hard. But unless you know how it can be done effectively, you will find it hard to get optimal results. Social bookmarking is also one of the quickest way to get you web page indexed and rank higher in search engines. It will increase your web site’s awareness. If you provide quality contents, you will find lots of return visitors and your web site traffic will increase due to your social bookmarketing efforts.

Google Buzz Is Creating Web Buzz

Dotcom Note — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 22:05:28 +0000

Yes, it’s buzz all over the web about Google buzz. Google buzz is different from Yahoo! buzz that we all buzz connoisseurs have ignored. Google has integrated social features to their GMail service. Now you can share contents with people in your inbox. But don’t expect it see it right away. They’re introducing the feature in batches. So, one morning when you log in to your Gmail account, you ‘ll see a buzz tab right under the inbox labeled “Buzz”. Just wait for it.

Some of the key features of Google buzz are auto following, fast sharing, public and private sharing, inbox integration, etc. Great bonanza for Internet marketers, I think. Watch the introduction video below:

However, not everybody is happy about it. Yahoo! immediately notified everybody about their own social sharing service. Some of their quotes are:

There are now more than 200 Yahoo! and third-party sites that feed into Yahoo! Updates – like Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, Yelp and Yahoo! Buzz – allowing people to see and share updates such as when they’ve uploaded photos, changed their status, buzzed up a news story or posted a new restaurant review, all from Yahoo!”

Yahoo! Updates now appear throughout the Yahoo! network, in popular sites and services like Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo.com, and Yahoo! Messenger and across our content properties, meaning people can always keep up to date with their friends’ latest activities

Yahoo! Updates are featured prominently on the “What’s New” section of Yahoo! Mail, which is used by more than 300M people worldwide. People can also update their status and share it with friends and family directly from the “What’s New” tab

Microsoft was little more hostile when they said

Busy people don’t want another social network, what they want is the convenience of aggregation. We’ve done that. Hotmail customers have benefitted from Microsoft working with Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and 75 other partners since 2008.

People are definitely not going to abandon Twitter and Facebook to rush to Google’s service. There are hundreds of other social media sites where you can do some of the same things and Internet marketers are using lots of these social media sites to build inbound links.But Google will definitely provide some good competition.

Google buzz is also integrated with Google maps and Google profile. Lots of people, specially the Internet marketers, use Gmail and now Bizz will be on their face. Some creative guy will definitely come up with a ebook or video course on how to use Buzz to make a million. I am just waiting.

Maria Andros Social Media Traffic Blueprint Revealed

Dotcom Note — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 07:00:11 +0000

For close to $1000, the Social Media Guru Maria Andros will teach you how to make millions using Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites. I bet Jack Dorsey, the creator of Twitter, did not dream that his service will open up untold riches for the hoipolloi. The program is Social Media Traffic Blueprint.

: Image via Wikipedia

And now Maria Andros has opened the door for everybody to untold riches using social media sites. She is going to tell her secrets to a chosen few who can afford close to $1000 to learn the mastery of social media sites for unimaginable profits. I can bet you that you can’t find the secrets she is going to reveal in hundreds of Twitter, Facebook and other social media related books at Amazon. I can’t.

I don’t know about her secrets. But some Guru says that his twitter followers jumped to more than 30 thousands after he implemented some of the techniques she suggested to him. So, I have to go by the Guru’s words.

According to the Guru, she has a blueprint. And he goes on explaining what a blueprint is in the email I received. That a blue print is a detailed plan. You don’t have to know anything. You just follow and magically every thing happens. Money flows from other people’s bank accounts to yours.

Wow, I did not really know how powerful the blueprint is. If I can get a blueprint for a house, I can just follow it and magically the house will be built. Wish I had known this before I purchased my house. Oh well, it is too late.

I headed over to Maria Andros social media traffic blueprint site. As expected, there was a video. I said to myself, “oh man, I have to watch this video now!” But I was lucky. The video is short and I can fast forward it. Good.

She is quick. Did not show me her fancy car or dream vacation. She started with the story of a guy who took a laep of faith and enrolled in her program by borrowing money from his credit card (the borrowing part I made it up). This guy did not have anything – no website, no product, and no list. I don’t know what kind of online business he was engaged in. I thought every internet marketer had at least one of the three.

The guy in the story joined the program hoping that some thing will magically happen to him. Lo and behold, within 30 days he made $75K in his business. Again, what was the business? Ok, may be he just made a “cute cat video” business to rake in the cash.

The four modules she is going to teach you are: 1. Youtube Channel and Branding, 2. Twitter Traffic, 3. Hypnotic Video Formulas, and 4. Competitive keyword Research and Analytics. Sorry, no Facebook. I was wrong. It is all videos.

Now you know Maria Andros Social Media Traffic Blueprint. Sign up with a leap of faith. You don’t need anything except close to $1,000. You will get it back as soon as you create your first “cute guinea pig video”.

How to Drive Web Site Traffic Using Social Video Optimization Techniques

Dotcom Note — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 05:39:10 +0000

The popularity of social video sites like YouTube, Yahoo Video, iFilm, blinkx is undeniable. YouTube alone receives more than 65,000 video uploads and plays 100 million clips every day. By 2010, video enthusiasts will consume 44 billion user generated video clips. This represents 55% of all the video content viewed by US consumers.

In the future, user generated videos may even end up on your television screen through the cables and satellites. YouTube has already announced incorporating the revenue sharing possibility with the creators of these video streams. Other sites may follow soon. You will be able to monetize your video contents and allow others to discover your skills and talents for better jobs or other lucrative offerings. To maximize the impact of your creativity, you need to know the kind of contents you have to produce and effectively present those contents in the video sharing sites.

Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/puroticorico/150696993/

The social video optimization is not about optimizing your videos for high search engine ranking (SEO). It is about making your videos for others to enjoy and learn from (providing benefits to people) and publishing those videos in social video and social media websites for viewers to easily discover, bookmark, and share for a viral effect.

1. Provide benefits. Offer something that will benefit others. It may be funny video clips, a series of “how-to” videos, an unusual moment, etc. Don’t upload any violent clips. Though these clips are popular in video sharing sites, most of the time they don’t provide any real value to the society. Unless the violence has journalistic value, don’t embrace it for amusement.

Funny clips are popular. Kids and pets provide plenty of opportunities to capture hilarious moments. If you have plumbing skills, offer a series of short “how to” videos on fixing things around the house. A computer geek can channel her skills in developing short videos on how to setup a home network. Plenty of opportunities are available. Find your niches and work in those areas. If you are comedian, create short stand-up comedy routine videos. The bottom line is to create themes and produce a series of videos based on each theme.

2. Provide enhanced viewing experience. People do not want to watch a full-length movie in a video-sharing site. A clip should not be more than 10 minutes long. Buy a cell phone with a good quality camera for capturing those unexpected moments. Otherwise, use a digital video camera for making your clips. Use a free online video editing sites like cuts.com for cutting video scenes, inserting title and sound effects, etc.

3. Create your brand. Companies spend millions to establish and promote brands. Why should not you? Brand recognition is very powerful and it may set you apart from others. Insert a few frames at the start and end of every video you create to introduce yourself, your skills and talents.

People like to associate with real persons rather than some unknown entities. Tell them what this video is all about. Make it short. Setup a blog and provide your blog URL in the introductory and conclusionary frames. Make the blog URL short for people to remember it easily.

4. Make it discoverable. This is like marketing your video on the video sharing sites. If you don’t do it properly, your contribution will be lost in the sea of video clips. Provide a short and catchy title with keywords related to your video. Relevant keywords will help locate your clips when people do a search. A catchy title in the search results will draw viewers’ attention.

Learn from the titles others are using by doing a search using your keywords in YouTube and other similar sites. The same goes for the description. Use relevant keywords but make it interesting to arouse curiosity. Write in the natural language and avoid adjectives. Let the users decide the quality of your presentation.

Tags are everywhere now a day. It is a keyword, not a keyword phrase. You should provide tags for your uploaded contents. If your titles and descriptions are relevant to your videos, you already have a few tags.

Besides the tags you have already collected from your title and description use one or more tags to closely identify your content to the categories available in the site. For example, on YouTube you have categories like “autos and vehicles”, “comedy”, “howto” etc.

If your video is about how to fix a flat tire, use additional tags like “tire”, “car”, etc. Add a few additional tags to describe the least important thing in your video. In the “fix a flat tire” video example, you can add tags like “stems”, “valve”, etc. Use as many tags as you can accommodate in the tag text box.

5. Relax and enjoy. You may be wondering why this is a rule. This is a rule because you do not want to feel the burnout. Enjoy what you are doing. Have a passion for your creative works. Don’t think about how much money you are going to make by producing these videos.

This is not going to make you rich overnight or within a very short time span. What is important is that you are pursuing something that you like. If the society is benefiting from your creative works, you will get adequate monetary rewards.